Aloeswood is produced from trees of the genus Aquilaria in Southeast Asia and southern China. Aloeswood is a product that has been a valuable item of trade since at least the time of the Roman Empire. Aloeswood was demanded as tribute by Chinese rulers from the early Chinese contact with peoples south of the Yangtze. The Chinese received aloeswood primarily from Ðại Việt and Champa, but these two states acquired it from minority peoples in their highlands. The fragrant substance from Aquilaria trees is produced when they are infected by a mold and in response the trees sends resin to the affected area imbuing it with scent and making very oily and heavy. Chunks of infected wood are the product known as aloeswood. Aloeswood was a sustainable item of trade for well over a millennia while its harvesting remaining in the hands of minority peoples who possessed the knowledge to determine if a given tree was infected and the wisdom to leave it alone until the aloeswood it contained had grown as large as possible. However, recently lowland Vietnamese have been cutting down any tree of the correct species on the theory that any such tree may contain aloeswood. This tree poaching is adding to other causes of deforestation. This paper will explore how the loss of indigenous knowledge of many of the historically traded products of Vietnam's waters, mountains, and forests is directly contributing to current environmental crises of deforestation and biodiversity loss through the specific example of aloeswood.

During the post-1945 transformation of Southeast Asia, investment in formerly colonized or constrained countries became common. For Thailand, in particular, the entire transportation sector became a focus, along with the major ports and rail lines.
This paper looks at the use of engineering and development aid as a tool of anti-Communist modernization on the part of American multinationals, here including TAMS (Tippetts, Abbett, McCarthy, and Stratton), Sverdrup and Parcel, and Raymond International. In some cases, these firms first moved abroad during World War II (S&P), building airfields and infrastructure in the South Pacific. Post-war occupations and the Korean War (Raymond) meant the chance to penetrate further, developing extensive overseas portfolios. In this context, “translation” holds multiple meaning, including American engineering culture, and the corresponding ideological aims of the roads to accompany the material.
In Thailand, these American firms, along with partners from the region, would develop an extensive highway network. This road campaign has often been characterized as having “dual use,” serving as transport, but also as a form of security in outlying Thai regions, often populated by ethnic minority groups. The paper examines how the American firms packaged these security concerns, and also how they used other forms of Asian labor (Korean, Japanese) in constructing a racialized work hierarchy.

How did psychologists construct emotion as an object of scientific inquiry during a period of transition and decolonization? In the first half of the twentieth century, working scientists in experimental psychology in China, Japan, and colonial Taiwan tackled emotion in similar yet different ways—the translation and application of psychometric tests as one of the ways in which we see divergent experiences and theorizations. Influenced by intellectual currents in Europe and the United States, East Asian psychologists tended to work within an emergent scientific view of emotions as purely physiological, nonintentional, and noncognitive processes that were nonetheless central to narratives of modernity. But in the aftermath of the Pacific War and the end of the Japanese empire, a handful of studies and surveys emerged that constructed certain emotions (notably fear and anxiety) as antagonistic to the formation of social, cultural, and racial identities that could navigate the complex realities of the postwar period. This paper seeks to explicate how certain emotions became marginalized and pathologized by exploring the translational peregrinations psychometric technologies have taken, leading up to and during the postwar period, as local actors attempted to enculturate science and make culture scientifically meaningful.